Pickpocket
A thirteen year-old pickpocket stumbles into the scandal of an absconded lady-in-waiting thought to have eloped - whose paramour turns-up dead. This is part one of an immersive serial mystery.
Pickpocket is a low-fantasy serial. A supplement to the audio drama The Thief. Go in cold, you don’t have to know anything. Thank you for gathering around the fire and letting me tell you a story. Please leave a coin in the algorithmic hat 🖤.
One.
There is a bazaar that from dawn through the first hours of morning fills-in the way a puddle blooms-up out of a depression during a storm.
The forum strewn out in front of the rathaus, when seen from Lorim’s Hill1, looks like a patchwork quilt of reds, oranges, and yellows. Before the day can get hot, this mosaic unfurls: the colors are unpacked from stalls where they had been wedged-up against the walls all week. Curls of smoke twirl through the canopy when the cooking fires get started.
And then there’s the noise. The market is peopled with noise. It drowns-out the gulls that circle in from the docks where they nest. The bells at the priory ring, but they can’t be heard. It’s tough to tell the passersby from the pickpockets.
Eadric wears white and stands out in sharp relief against the sunset-colored stall. He hawks lye. This must be done with care. His neighbor, bolts of wool.
Hilde plucks strings in front of an empty bowl. Breakfasters across the way hone-in on Hilde’s rotta, rather than the smith clanking downriver — or her tethered goat bleating.
Market-goers ride the current. They drift with the tide, pushing and pulling against each other, alive, unbroken.
If you care to focus you find the tableaus: Leofwine throws a shawl around himself to ward against the butcher’s splatter; Osburh peddles copper trinkets and wears charms; Fowler2 trades a penny to drink from a ladle.
Soon enough, the tide swells and the rhythm supersedes the notes.
Catrin mumbles a pardon. She is walking against the current and bumps shoulders with a haldæn3. She lost a step, but she’s too small to interrupt his, so the haldæn says nothing and disappears in the crowd. She hugs the bundle she carries tighter to her chest. She makes herself small.
And, so, she moves slow.
Slow, on alert, braided, clean, tailored, blue. Catrin stands out. Fowler, just thirteen, sees her. She leaves a wake through the crowd that Fowler has learned to see — to feel. As a sailor learns the current.
Áda4, he imagines, watches over his shoulder. “Don’t try to train your eyes on them. They dart into the long grass at the bottom, weaving through, stealing away with their worm. But — keep your shoulders back. Don’t hover, don’t let them see you, smell you. Know where your shadow is, or they’ll spook and you’ll lose the line. No, let the crowd come between you. You can feel the thread. You follow the pull.”
“But she —,” Fowler starts.
“She look like she works hard for her trinkets, does she? You know better.”
Fowler’s bleeding heart. So, Áda polices his tone and turns the boy by the shoulder that they might face each other. They look nothing alike. He advises low, so as not to scare the fish. “Those aren’t stones she’s walking on. Those are backs. Hundreds of them. Like yours. From Oarsmarket.”
“I know, áda.”
“You know. What is life, little mouse?”
“— a boot, áda.”
“A boot,” áda confirms. He looks the boy in the face for a long moment. “Life is a boot in your face, forever and ever. Hers.”
Fowler is in the heart of the bazaar and it lapses forward, catching-up, stuck on some kind of revelry, lagging. Colors swirling. Áda’s words blur into a low thrum.
But, there it is — the thread’s taut.
Fowler stays in Catrin’s wake, drawn after by some impulse anthropomorphized beyond instinct. For her, this place is discordant. She stays in the shallows. The widow Eadgifu with a vase underarm is kind to her (“do you need help finding someone?”) but Catrin on instinct recoils (“no! No, thank you.”)
A knot of market-goers come between them.
“Actually,” she starts, and she reconsiders the bundle in her arms. “I — I want to sell some things from a dressing table? A comb, a mirror ….”
Áda growls in Fowler’s ear: “you aren’t a stone.” A comb, a mirror. Was there more? The widow is saying something, but áda lays-in, “drift — or you’ll be caught” —
“I know,” Fowler - punctuates. Aloud.
Braced for the lecture, it doesn’t come.
Áda, of course, isn’t here — was never.
The bazaar flows around him.
The pickpocket’s line goes slack.
Pickpocket is a low-fantasy serial. The story continues next week. Leave a coin 🖤 in the algorithmic hat and leave a comment and a like.
Lorim’s Hill is built on — or around — the earliest site of Áendhrod. It is, or was, a high hill around which they threw walls, which the city outgrew. So they built new walls, and even newer walls later, until walls per se were no longer practical. Lorim’s Hill is now part of “old town.” It is poor. Weather-beaten. Salt-eaten. We really explore Lorim’s Hill in S103 The First Stone • Chapter Two :: Part One.
Fowler is first introduced in Rogue Bazaar • Chapter One :: Part One.
A haldæn is a watchman, a guard.
áda (n.) — “father” in Oerwyhrîn.